


a bad leg and enough sense

by pinuspinea



Series: The Librarian [2]
Category: Dracula & Related Fandoms, Dracula - Bram Stoker, The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Captivity, Gen, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21646300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinuspinea/pseuds/pinuspinea
Summary: "You keep us guessing. Most wouldn't have the patience to wait a year for their first attempt.""Most people don't have a bad leg and enough sense to figure out how to break into the garage and hot-wire a car.".The library as seen through Eszter's eyes. This work takes place before the events of "The Librarian". The main work is strongly suggested to be read before this work.
Series: The Librarian [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1560490
Kudos: 2





	a bad leg and enough sense

"I'm sorry, but I think I _must_ have misheard. Could you repeat that?"

Eszter cannot help but stare at the woman in front of her. Florence, she said her name was. Eszter knows better than to believe something like that outright. It's not like that man didn't just show up in their home a few days ago, or what feels like a few days ago, and hurt her mother and then when Eszter finally limped to see what the racket was, did something to her and stole her away into this place.

"I said we are vampires," Florence enunciates clearly. Eszter stares at the woman blankly.

"Vampires."

"Yes, vampires."

"Like Dracula?"

There is a very interesting look that passes on Florence's face at that comment.

"Do you know what your mother was working on?" Florence apparently has decided to change tactics. Eszter studies the woman for a moment and wonders if these people know more about that than she did. After all, her mom rarely spoke about much at the hospital whenever she came to visit Eszter, and Eszter had been at home for only a few days before this whole thing happened.

She still isn't convinced these people aren't part of the secret police, though why someone would hire an American, an Italian, and someone who sounded to be about two hundred years off when speaking Hungarian is a mystery to Eszter.

Eszter shakes her head. That apparently is good enough an answer to Florence.

"Your mother was studying epidemics during the 15th century," Florence explains, "and she happened to come across a particular one that seemed to spread in a very suspicious manner. She got interested and started connecting the dots, and then she was offered a book like everyone who gets interested in that particular mystery gets offered one, and then she continued her research and was quite good at that. That is why Vlad decided to bring your mother into the fold. It's just bad luck you happened to be there and see him."

"Why would anyone care about 15th century epidemics?" Eszter asks confusedly. "It's not like that is a particularly major area of research."

"It is because your mother studied the vampire epidemic I was behind," a familiar voice says. Eszter nearly jumps up from her chair and then hisses in pain. She grasps her leg as she looks at the man who took her into this odd place. The man settles down onto a chair next to Florence. Eszter stares at him.

"You look remarkably young for someone who is supposedly five hundred years old," Eszter cannot help but say. There is amusement in the man's cruel eyes, though his face remains impassive.

"You may have heard of me before. Vlad Dracula," he tells his name to her. Eszter stares at him for a long moment and then leans back in her chair. She stares at the tall bookshelves for a very, very long moment.

"Vlad Dracula. As in the prince who impaled Turks like there was no tomorrow."

"Guilty as charged," he says. Eszter shakes her head.

"That definitely explains why you sound like you've never encountered a modern dictionary," Eszter mutters before she has enough sense to stop herself. The man stops for a second or two.

"You have quite the mouth on you," he says very slowly, drawling the words until they sound more like hisses. Eszter can feel her heart running wildly.

"To be fair, you just did tell me that vampires are real and you're supposedly a Romanian mass-murderer from half a millennium ago," Eszter notes, a hint of hysteria starting to colour her voice. "Either this is a really weird dream or then I'm dead and in purgatory."

"Or then you are still alive," Florence mutters and pulls up her shirtsleeve. Before Eszter can ask about it, Florence grabs her hand and rests Eszter's fingers against her wrist. It is ice cold. Eszter sits there for a long moment.

There is no pulse. Florence opens her mouth and bares her teeth.

"Did you really not think anything about the teeth?" Florence asks, almost in frustration. Eszter stares at the woman.

There is another moment of silence. Then, very quiet, and very emphatic:

"What the devil."

"No, not a devil, Eszter," Vlad says with his eyes boring into her. "Vampires."

Eszter is very proud of herself for only calmly nodding her head and not letting out that string of swear words that is just bubbling underneath the surface.

* * *

It takes a year for their constant controlling of Eszter to start ease up, but she is nothing if not patient after her long stay in the hospital. She waits her days and looks for opportunities, but instead of taking her chances immediately, she decides to wait until all the pieces of the puzzle snap into place.

Florence starts leaving her crutches with her after a month of Eszter bringing up the fact that there is no reason to use a bedpan during the day when there is a perfectly good bathroom just next door. Her brace she must wait a little longer for, but eventually, they relent after seeing her good behaviour. It takes a bit longer to figure out where the telephone line connecting the library to the outer world runs from and to find some books in the library that describe what it's like to drive a car, but Eszter manages to slip them unnoticed. She reads the instructions, waits for the right moment, and then she picks the lock to the garage, cuts the phone line, and sets herself behind the wheel.

Eszter takes in a shaky breath and then turns the key of the car. The engine starts rumbling after coughing up a few times and Eszter's heart is running wild as she guides the car slowly out of the garage and then towards the road away from the library. It's nerve-wrecking to drive on that narrow road. Eszter doesn't dare put on a larger gear than number two, and even then, she is constantly hitting the brake and trying to control her speed. The road is narrow and winding, on the one side a mountainside and on the other a long drop. Eszter squeezes the wheel tightly.

And then all goes to hell when the break disappears under her lame leg. Eszter lets out a small scream as the car roars down the mountainside, and then there is tumbling and pain and the wheel that hits her in the head.

Eszter doesn't know how long she is out of it when the hands grab around her and pull her out of the vehicle. She is still out of it when she is put inside an ambulance and rushed to the nearest village. Her eyes look at the evening sky where the sun is starting to set.

The next time she opens her eyes, she feels fuzzy like the world isn't all there. She blinks slowly and sees Vlad staring straight at her face.

"Quite clever of you to steal the car," the man says. Eszter breathes slowly. There is a sharp pain near her collarbone.

"You should have guessed that I would at least try once," she manages to force out. Vlad raises an eyebrow.

"Oh, I did expect that," he says, but whatever follows those words is lost to Eszter.

She blinks in and out of consciousness for what must be a few days. Eventually, she wakes up to see Florence and Matteo in the room. The doctor, who is nervous and has kept almost constant vigil outside the small inpatient room, is murmuring something to the two of them. Florence steps over and leans over Eszter's leg. Florence puts on the brace and tightens the narrow strips of leather harshly, not saying anything.

Eszter is so out of it with the pain medication that she doesn't even realise to be afraid during the ride up the mountain.

Vlad is waiting by the door. Only then does Eszter start wondering what will happen now.

"Will you punish me now?" she asks. Vlad looks at her bruised and fragile form. Her collarbone snapped cleanly in the accident. Matteo is carrying her weight, tough Eszter is quite sure the man was trying to cop a feel of her breasts before he saw that Vlad was there.

"You seem to have done an admirable job of it yourself," Vlad only says and disappears into the library.

It is weeks later that Eszter can move on her own again, leaning on her crutches and limping around. It is weeks later that the bruises fade, and the hunger really sets in. It is weeks later that she starts thinking about her second escape attempt.

* * *

It takes a while for Eszter to really notice it, but the library truly is a masterpiece. There is something very comforting in the sight of all these books, something very comforting in the way that things stay the same. Each month, new books arrive. Each month, the empty shelves get filled up, yet even with that, there isn't much that changes. There are just more books. The days and nights remain much the same.

Eszter glances at the shelf, deep in thought, and calculates the space needed by the new batch of books. The current system in place has worked so far, but Eszter wonders if it will handle all the books that will eventually line the walls of the library. There are going to be some issues for Vlad's collection of philosophical works, that can be said.

Simply sorting through the subject matter may not be enough anymore. Eszter wonders if she should start creating smaller categories. Heaven knows Vlad is particular about keeping Eszter's science fiction novels far away from these shelves, though he seems oddly blasé about mixing fact with fiction and keeping torture manuals alongside accounts of war crimes.

"What are you thinking about?" Vlad asks her. Eszter closes her eyes.

"Would it really be that hard for you to stop giving me heart attacks?" she asks venomously. The man chuckles.

"I must have some entertainment here, dear Eszter," he tells her. Eszter simply sighs.

"I was actually thinking about how it might be the time to start thinking about a new organisational system," she tells Vlad. The man raises his eyebrows and looks at Eszter, a bit surprised but not dismissing the idea outright. Eszter waits for his thoughts patiently.

It takes a while for him to nod his head.

"Yes, I could see why you would want a new system in place," he eventually murmurs. Eszter looks at the long shelf of philosophical books that is almost filled up already.

"Subcategories would be a tremendous help, but it will take some time to resort all the books again," she sighs. Vlad nods again.

"That we do have here," he notes, not impatiently, just reminding Eszter of the realities of the library. She keeps forgetting that these people do not have the same constraints of time as she seems to have.

"I was thinking about the Dewey decimal system, but I don't think that will work here," Eszter says eventually. "I was wondering if you would allow me to create my own system."

"I would not be against it, if you kept the main categories similar enough to what they are now," he tells. Eszter smiles a little.

"And perhaps add a few?" she suggests. "I really want to separate fact from fiction, not to mention add some categorisation for the fiction shelves."

Vlad's lips twitch a little.

"A good try, but you will not add those blasphemies of science into my collection," he tells her sternly. Eszter chuckles a little.

"At least you're too big a bibliophile to burn them," she jokes. Vlad is suspiciously quiet for a long time. Eszter narrows her eyes. "Don't you dare." Vlad glances at her. "Vlad, if you burn my books, I will haunt you for the rest of your miserable un-life."

"That would be quite a sight," he murmurs thoughtfully and then leaves a sputtering Eszter by that wall of philosophical books.

* * *

Her third escape attempt ends in a world of pain and days upon days of torture. Eszter holds herself still during the days and tells herself that it was still worth it, tells herself how she had to try. She keeps her will to fight until Vlad summons her to one of the rooms in the forbidden corridor.

Eszter stands at the door and stares at her mother whose face is pale and almost unrecognisable. Eszter stares at her mother and sits down on the lone chair knowing full well Vlad has intended it so.

Her mother stands there, looking at the daughter that was taken as a hostage. She is too busy to study Eszter to notice how swiftly Vlad moves. Eszter doesn't scream when the glinting knife in Vlad's hand is plunged so deep into her mother that it pricks the fabric of the shirt in the front, all the way through. Her mother lets out a garble. There is foam coming in from her mouth as Vlad twists the knife.

There is no sense of time as Eszter looks at how her mother dies. There is no sense of time for something like that.

Vlad wipes the knife clean with her mother's shirt while she is still battling against certain death. Eszter doesn't know how much later she stops making any sound, then how long it takes for her to completely to stop moving.

There is so much blood on the stone floor. Eszter stares at the sight in front of her and cannot understand it.

"You will never run again, Eszter," Vlad tells her. "This was your last attempt."

Eszter's too much in shock to even understand it all. She simply stares blankly at Vlad.

"But I can't even run," she manages to mumble. The man bends his head a little and then studies the corpse of Eszter's mother. It lies unnaturally still but already looks like it has been dead for much longer than those minutes that have passed between the last drawn breath and now. Eszter at least thinks it has only been a few minutes, but her head hurts as she looks at the sight. She blinks slowly and breathes even slower.

Vlad steps closer and takes her chin. He lifts it up and stares into her eyes and straight into her soul.

"Your mother would have died in any case," he tells her, "but had you not run, you would not have had to witness this."

He leaves her in the room with her mother's corpse, locks the door behind himself. Eszter sits on the chair and stares at her mother's features and thinks about the fact that she had forgotten how they looked like during all that time alone at the library.

It must be hours later when Florence comes and gets her. The woman offers no comforting words to Eszter, as she only opens the door and calls her name. Eszter gets up and slips the crutches under her arms. She follows Florence blindly into the library. She follows Florence back to her usual workstation and returns to work like nothing had ever happened.

Eszter doesn't cry for her mother that night or any of the following ones. There simply are no tears left, just an empty void in the place where hope of returning to life as it used to be now is missing from.

* * *

The few months Eszter tries to live like a human seem to irritate Matteo more than they irritate Vlad or Florence. The man gives scathing looks to the young girl whenever they cross paths during early evening hours, but he does not try to convince Eszter to go back to living in their rhythm of staying up all night and then sleeping the day. None of them do that. Instead, they let her do whatever she wants.

Eszter gives up eventually. The change back to what used to be is not commented on either, but Vlad does cast a knowing look in her direction once he returns from some trip to the outside world.

"Did you get it out of your system?" he asks her. Eszter stubbornly puts another archival card into the writing machine and tries to avoid answering, but Vlad is a master of forcing people to answer just with his presence. It does not take long at all for Eszter to finally cave in.

"Yes," she mutters and starts typing the details of the book. Vlad nods his head.

He is gone the next time Eszter looks up.

* * *

Months pass by in a blur. Eszter stops counting the days and trying to keep time. She is tired of knowing how much time passes in the outside world, tired of thinking about how old her father must be growing, how close she is to adulthood. She stops caring about such impossible thoughts, and instead focuses on life at the library.

The days follow each other. Eszter lives through the punishment of her third escape attempt and the months that they keep a careful eye on her. The battle in her is gone. She now knows it is only wasted energy to try and fight against the inevitable, so she allows the library to consume her and to finally let herself think about the coming years there.

The days are long during the summer and the nights short. Eszter has so much time to herself that she sometimes feels a little lost. Some mornings they lock the gate to her wing, but increasingly, they leave it open. Before, Eszter didn't even dream about leaving her rooms during the daylight hours in fear of being caught, but now, she is less afraid.

One morning, when the gate is open and the sun high upon the sky, Eszter limps her way out of the rooms she has studied in detail during her time there. It is surprising how different things look with just a bit of light. The library no longer feels like the same maze, but a place of learning that is protective of her. Eszter travels the familiar rows and looks at it all with new eyes.

There is a moment of hesitation when she looks at the forbidden corridor, but eventually, she does take a few steps in there. There are only a few doors she dares peek behind before she hurries back, spooked by the staircase down into the embrace of earth itself. She knows they sleep there. It is too horrible to get any closer, so she returns to the rest of the house and finds nooks and crannies that the shadows of night have previously hidden from her.

There is an unfamiliar door in a corridor Eszter must have walked a thousand times. She stops in front of it and then tries the handle. The door creaks a little but pushes open with a bit of force. It reveals daylight, clear daylight. Eszter is mesmerised as she steps through.

There is a garden at the library. It may be overgrown and abandoned, but there is an actual garden alongside all that death. Eszter stands among all the flowers of summer with the sun embracing her hair, and she breathes in deeply and closes her eyes for a moment. She raises her face towards the sun and stands there, just stands there, quietly crying and leaning against her crutches, before she eventually opens her eyes, wipes them, and starts exploring all the wonders the garden has hidden away.

A lone fountain is in the middle of it all, cracked and empty of water. The plants grow wild, uncaring about the harsh environment, but the most stunning feature about it all is the lookout. Eszter sits down with her legs weak and her eyes roam through the landscape. The mountains are harsh in their forms, but here, they look more sculpted than ever before. The light plays in the valleys and crevasses, highlighting some parts while obscuring others. She sees far away, so far away, and for a moment, Eszter forgets everything. She forgets about the library, forgets about Vlad, forgets her mother, even forgets she used to live in Hungary. No, when she looks at that scene, her soul soothes and calms down.

There is no longer any need to fight. Eszter sits there and tries to take in everything with her eyes, hungry for more, but eventually she realises there is no hurry. She has the option to come here whenever she needs to feel like this again.

Eventually, she falls asleep in the sunshine. She only wakes up when the sun is already starting to set, and she hurries back inside and closes the door to the garden behind her. She returns to her wing, conscious how close she came to getting caught, and then tries to make herself look like she didn't sleep outside. She doesn't do a particularly good job at that as her skin a bit red from being exposed to the sun for such a long time, but when she joins the others in the library, none of them comment upon it.

Sometimes Eszter sits in the garden for hours upon hours, sometimes she just stops by for a moment. Every visit makes her breathe just a little bit easier.

She starts learning how to live again, even without knowing it, forgets what used to be and accepts what now is. The others see it, and none better than Vlad who one day notes to his vassals that Eszter will make a fine addition to their group one day, to the surprise of everyone else other than Florence. The woman simply smiles to herself, proud of having foreseen their master's conclusion years earlier, but does not boast with the fact.

Eszter is simply told that she will be turned one day, but not when she is still so young. The girl, or perhaps by now a woman, simply nods and sits there in quiet for a while.

She does not fight against it nor does she ask when they plan to do it. She simply accepts it.

Her world has already changed so much. Such a minor detail as dying shouldn't be that difficult to get used to.

* * *

Eszter wakes up to someone sneaking his hand up her thigh. She opens her eyes in a flash of panic and screams.

"Shut up!" the man who came to the library just a few days ago hisses angrily and covers her mouth. Eszter tries to fight against him, tries to push him off her, but he is too strong and lying on top of her.

She can't breathe. The man wraps a heavy hand around her throat and squeezes and the room is starting to get even darker in Eszter's eyes and the man is squeezing her face with his other hand much too tightly and –

Something pulls the man off her and throws him heavily against the wall. Eszter draws in a large gasp of air and pants as she quickly slips further away until she falls off the bed completely. It takes a while for her eyes to realise it is Vlad in her room in addition to the man. Vlad is holding him tightly and is growling a little.

"Get out. Now."

His words give the lowly fledgling no other option but to flee, and flee he does after Vlad physically throws him out of the room. Eszter covers her face and feels tears burning on her cheeks.

Vlad stares out the door for a long moment before turning to Eszter. Without a word, he crosses the room in a few long strides and grabs Eszter. It is surprisingly gentle for a man who is literally angry enough for murder.

He does not hold her for long. No, he simply deposits her back on the bed.

"Did he hurt you?" Vlad asks. His voice is too quiet and too sharp, promising only eternal pain to the man. Eszter shivers in fear as she grasps at her torn pyjama top.

"He didn't have time," she says and starts sobbing.

Vlad walks out the room. Eszter lets the tears come and she curls up tightly. The thoughts running inside her head are too raw to face right now.

Something touches the side of her face. Eszter flinches as Vlad sits down on the bed next to her and studies her face before giving her a cold pack.

"Better ice it for a while," he tells her. "It would be a shame if your face was bruised by this."

Eszter tries to swallow back her tears, but it is nigh impossible. Vlad keeps studying her face for long moments as she holds the cold pack against her face and wipes tears with her hands.

"You probably think I'm stupid and weak," Eszter forces out.

"On the contrary, I do not," Vlad says. He is calm and collected as if he was not in a murderous rage just moments before. "No one has ever hurt you here. You thought you were untouchable in this room."

Eszter swallows the words that threaten to come out. Instead she closes her eyes for a long moment.

"Thank you," she says eventually and looks at Vlad. The man is still for a moment.

"You need not thank me, Eszter," he tells her.

"You could have let it happen," Eszter says and flinches at the thought. Vlad shakes his head.

"I do not shy away from punishing you, but you have not done anything worth punishing for recently," he tells her. Eszter sits there in silence, thinking about his words. "He acted distastefully by trying to take something from you that you had not given to him."

Eszter is still for a long moment.

"So, murder is alright, but rape isn't?" she eventually asks. Vlad looks at her.

"I do have some morals," he says dryly and leaves her room.

The sun is high up on the sky by the time Eszter has stopped shaking and has made her way into the bathroom. She studies her face from the mirror. The ice has helped. The skin is a little red, but there does not seem to be a bruise forming. There are scratches on her neck, but those can be covered with a shirt that has a high neck.

God knows Florence has filled Eszter's wardrobe with those.

A few days later, the man manages to pour a full inkwell on one of Vlad's favourite books. Even though he begs for his master to have mercy on him, he is promptly taken outside and impaled on a long pole. Eszter shivers a little every time she hears the moans coming from outside. It takes the man a long time to die, and even longer for Eszter to tell Vlad that the stench is strong enough for her to throw up.

It is only years later that Eszter even thinks about the possibility that it was not an accident that the man poured that inkwell all over that book.

* * *

Eventually, there comes a time when Eszter finally accepts she will never leave the library alive. There comes a time when she stops thinking about the possibility of escape, stops thinking about what her life could have been in Hungary, stops thinking about the mother she has lost. Eventually, there comes a time when she is content in her life.

She has her books, and those books are very dear to her heart. Vlad's trove of treasures is spectacular. Each new day brings new books, worth immeasurable amounts of money. She has permission to read anything she wants, and the library's collection is vast. There are books that have been lost to time, books just out of the printing machine, books Eszter has never even heard of before. All these treasures are for them to appreciate and to read.

There are days that are harder than others. Eszter has bad days with her leg and days when her human body is cranky and forces her to rest in her bed. There are days when Vlad is more harsh than usual, but the punishments are for things Eszter knows to expect to be punished about. She can take that.

Then, one night, when Eszter is ready to go to sleep, Vlad returns from one of his trips to the outside world. This time it is different, Eszter knows that immediately. This time, everything is going to change.

This time he has a young girl with him, and he puts her into one of the unused bedrooms in the human wing. Eszter comes out of her room and looks uncertainly at the man.

"Keep an eye on her, won't you, Eszter?"

At that time, neither he nor she knows how the girl will change Eszter's world, how that girl will eventually talk Eszter into a fourth escape attempt. At that time, Eszter only nods her head and settles onto the sofa with the clothes she wore that night and focuses her attention on the book she's in the middle of.

At that time, she glances at the unused bedroom's door and wonders what her life will be like with the new girl. At that time, she has no answer. Later, she will know.

Even later, she will return to the library of her own free will, and only then will she know for certain that she will suit that life just as well as Vlad has expected her to.


End file.
